A humanist in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead and Douglas Bush, Walter Jackson Bate has distinguished himself in all of the major areas of criticism and scholarship. As an editor, explicator of texts, intellectual historian, biographer, and teacher. Bate, in his more than half a century at Harvard University, attained recognition as a central Figure in literary scholarship and pedagogy. During his long career he has been a devoted seeker of the truth about people and ideas and has expressed his wide-ranging discoveries and insights in language of unexcelled clarity. All the while he has remained unaffected by the critical fads of the moment.

Bate was born in Mankato, Minnesota, on 23 May 1918, the second of Five children of William G. and Isabel Melick Bate. His father was the principal of the local high school. In 1920 the family moved to Richmond, Indiana, where Bate's father became superintendent of...